Running into a blank 404 page is one of the most frustrating experiences someone can have on the internet.
There you are, scouring the internet for information on a topic or how to fix whatever problem you’re having. You finally find the specific answer you’re looking for, you click on the link, and rather than finding solutions or answers or guidance, you’re greeted with a big, blank, 404 page with nothing on it.
Not only is this bad for your user’s experience, but when they add up, they can be detrimental for your SEO—potentially costing thousands to make up for lost harm.
To prevent that from happening, we’ll walk through what broken backlinks are, why they hurt your website, and how to identify and fix them before they can.
What Are Broken Backlinks?
A broken backlink is a link between two websites that no longer works. They are also known as broken inbound links or external links, to contrast with internal links that link two pages within your own website. Broken backlinks often lead to a blank page with a 404 error message.
Internal links can be found with most web crawler tools and are relatively straightforward to fix. Broken external links are a little more tricky—they require more deliberate maintenance and auditing to seek out and are more cumbersome to rectify. This is because you’re not in direct control of the webpage where the link originates and what its destination URL is.
Why Are Broken Backlinks A Problem?
Broken backlinks can often go undetected for years, adding up to hundreds or thousands of dead links because of all the ways they can happen. While the effect of a single broken link is negligible, lots of broken links can wreak havoc on your website’s SEO health and become harder to manage the more they accumulate.
Here are a few reasons why broken backlinks are problematic.
Broken Links Disrupt PageRank
The quality, number, and authoritativeness of your website’s backlinks is one of the most powerful SEO ranking factors. Google uses your websites’ backlinks to determine its quality and trustworthiness and evaluate its PageRank. It also uses the anchor text of your backlinks to better understand what your content is about and how it’s relevant to what your users are trying to find.
When your backlinks become broken, it prevents Google from crawling your website effectively and it stops PageRank from passing between those referring domains to yours. It also depletes your allocated amount for crawling (from Google), and can lead to indexation problems.
According to Ahrefs, at least 66.5% of links to sites in the last nine years are dead. So if you don’t continually monitor for broken backlinks, your dead link accumulation could lead to link rot—an SEO faux pas.
They Create a Bad User Experience
Broken backlinks that lead to 404 pages with no other context are frustrating and confusing, and bad news has a way of getting around the internet. 44% of users will tell their friends when they have a bad online experience.
It’s important to remember that search engine algorithms solve for the user. If a user encounters a broken backlink and has no other way to navigate around your site, they will leave your site and cause your bounce rate to go up. Google and other search engines take this into account when it ranks pages on your website. It’s effectively a signal that your website is old, poorly maintained, or no longer used.
They Affect Your ROI
Your content and your keyword rankings are there to generate revenue. Ultimately the purpose of your website’s content is to funnel users to the parts of your website where they buy your product or service.
When a user comes to a website seeking information and finds nothing, they’ll probably go to your competitors to find what they’re looking for instead, ultimately making it more likely they’ll do business with them rather than you.
What Causes Broken Backlinks?
Backlinks can become broken or misdirected for several reasons, and they’re likely to accumulate as a website grows, adds more content, and builds a bigger backlink profile.
The most common cause of broken backlinks is when a webpage is renamed or moved without setting up a redirect.
But there are many other reasons why broken backlinks can happen, too. Here are some common ones:
- Broken technical elements. Plugins or broken elements and code within the page itself, or if a website is down.
- URL changes. The webpage is moved to a new URL, the URL structure of the webpage is changed during a CMS migration or a website restructure, or the referring domain with the original link is taken down or goes offline.
- Downloadable content removal. The link leads to interactive content like videos or PDFs that have been taken off your website’s server.
- Typos and misspelled URLs. The referring domain where the link originates from has typos in the URL (missing characters, underscores, etc.).
- Geolocation restrictions. If content is unavailable in certain regions due to firewalls or regional legislations.
What Are Common Types of Broken Backlinks?
Understanding the different types of broken backlinks can help you identify and address them more effectively. Here are some of the most common types you’re likely to encounter:
404 Not Found Errors
This is the most common type of broken backlink, and occurs when the linked page no longer exists or has been moved without a redirect. It often results from content deletion or URL structure changes.
301 Redirect Chains
While not technically “broken,” these can cause issues. 301 redirect chains occur when a link goes through multiple redirects before reaching the final destination. They can slow down page load times and dilute link equity.
Soft 404 Errors
These are pages that return a 200 OK status, but actually display a “not found” message. They can confuse both search engines and users, and often occur with poorly implemented custom 404 pages.
Related: How To Fix Soft 404 Errors
500 Internal Server Errors
These indicate a server-side problem, and can be temporary or persistent. They may result from server misconfigurations or resource limitations.
403 Forbidden Errors
These occur when the server understands the request but refuses to authorize it, often due to permission issues or content restrictions.
SSL Certificate Errors
These happen when there’s a mismatch between the SSL certificate and the domain, and can occur if a site moves from HTTP to HTTPS without updating all links.
Related: Best Practices for JavaScript Performance Optimization
Broken Image Links
While not traditional backlinks, broken image links can still impact user experience and SEO. These often occur when images are moved or deleted without updating references.
Malformed URLs
URLs that are structurally incorrect, often resulting from typos, improper encoding, or errors in link generation.
While this isn’t an exhaustive list of the types of broken backlinks you and your users may experience, these are common ones to be aware of. Understanding these can help you diagnose issues more quickly and implement the appropriate fixes.
Next up: how to spot and fix your broken backlinks.
How to Spot Broken Backlinks
The more broken backlinks start to pile up, the more they’ll hurt your user experience and damage your hard-earned SEO keyword rankings. That’s why it’s better to nip them in the bud before they can do any damage through routine website maintenance and technical SEO audits.
Thankfully there are several commonly-used technical SEO tools you can use to find broken backlinks—many of which are free or come bundled with your Google Webmaster account.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free way to help you find your broken backlinks that come bundled with your Google Webmaster tools. This won’t help you track the broken external links themselves, but it will help you identify which of your pages have 404 errors so you can redirect their backlinks to your other content.
To make this custom report:
- Go to the Site Content/All Pages tab under Behavior
- Select the date range you want to look at. If you do monthly audits for example, set the date range back to the previous month
- Click the “advanced” option, and set up a filter including Page Title/Containing/404
This will bring up your 404 page URL. Once you click on that, you see all the links that lead to that 404. You can then export a spreadsheet and redirect those links to their intended page, or remove any dead links that are defunct.
Your SEO Software
Most SEO softwares have backlinks reports. For example, Ahrefs Site Explorer has a broken backlinks report that gives you all of the broken external links leading to your website in a single view. You can also use Ahrefs to do a crawl of your website, then look at your external links and filter out any 4xx status codes.
This way, you can see where all the broken backlinks are coming from, as well as which pages on your website they’re leading to. This is also useful if you want to prioritize your broken backlinks by their Domain Authority and Page Authority for the most effective and immediate results.
How To Fix Broken Backlinks
You don’t want to leave broken backlinks unaddressed. Fixing broken links depends largely on whether the broken link is internal or external.
Here are a few ways you can fix them, primarily if they’re external:
- Ask the hosting website to change the link. If the hosting website makes a mistake (for example, if their hyperlink includes typos or missing characters), it creates a poor user experience for their website visitors as well as your own. Get in touch with whoever is in charge of the content that’s linking to you, notify them of the problem, and let them know where they should link instead.
- Set up 301 redirects to other pages on your website. Find other suitable pages that are related to the original content, and have the external links lead there instead. If the original content is unavailable or has been removed from the server, you can use Wayback Machine to find out what it originally looked like
- Replace or recreate the missing content. If there aren’t any suitable replacements for the missing content, you may have to make something similar from scratch, then have the external links redirect to that instead.
- Create a hard 404. Let’s say recreating the content or having the links lead somewhere else on your website somehow isn’t an option. In that case, you can at least set up a functional 404 page—an interactive page that exists within your website’s architecture has all its branding, displays your website navigation, and most importantly lets the user move to other parts of your website. That way, your user at least has the option of browsing through your website themselves to find what they need.
- Solve the issues outlined in your SEO software. More often than not, your SEO software will tell you exactly what you need to do to fix the specific broken backlink error. Once you complete your audit, you can follow step-by-step instructions based on each unique backlink.
Prioritize Technical Site Maintenance
Broken backlinks are a troublesome website maintenance issue that becomes more problematic the longer it goes unresolved. Thankfully, regular website maintenance makes this problem manageable before it can do much harm to your rankings.
Along with broken backlinks, prioritize regular site maintenance to identify if your site is facing other technical SEO issues, such as sudden drops in traffic or crawling and indexing challenges. If either of these aforementioned issues applies, consider integrating with a technical SEO software like Prerender.io.
Prerender is a pre-built rendering platform that helps search engines seamlessly read your site’s JavaScript content. It’s an ideal solution for frequently-changing, JavaScript-heavy websites, such as those required for ecommerce, betting, real estate, and travel. It’s a much more cost-effective alternative than in-house server-side rendering.
Watch this video below to see if it might benefit you:
Curious to see how Prerender can help your website? Prerender is trusted by 65,000+ businesses worldwide, such as Salesforce, Wix, and more. Start your trial today and enjoy 1000 free renders, or contact us for custom solutions.
FAQs
How Often Should I Check for Broken Backlinks?
It’s recommended to audit your backlinks at least once a month. For larger websites or those with frequent content changes, consider bi-weekly checks. Regular monitoring and maintenance helps catch and fix issues before they significantly impact your SEO. We recommend checking SEO tools like Prerender.io on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Can Broken Backlinks Hurt My Website Even If I Didn’t Create Them?
Yes, broken backlinks can negatively affect your site’s SEO regardless of their origin. While you’re not responsible for creating external links, managing and mitigating them is crucial for maintaining your site’s health and user experience.
Are There Any Tools That Can Automatically Fix Broken Backlinks?
While there are tools that help identify broken backlinks, automatic fixing isn’t currently possible. However, some SEO tools can assist in creating redirects or suggesting relevant pages for redirection. The process usually requires manual review and implementation.
How Do Broken Backlinks Affect Mobile SEO Differently From Desktop?
Broken backlinks can have a more severe impact on mobile SEO. This is because of the emphasis on user experience in mobile-first indexing. Mobile users are often more sensitive to poor experiences, and broken links can lead to higher bounce rates on mobile devices. This can potentially impact mobile rankings more significantly.
Can Having Too Many Redirects for Broken Backlinks Negatively Impact SEO?
While redirects are a good solution for broken backlinks, having too many can slow down your site and impact crawl efficiency. It’s best to use redirects cautiously. Where possible, update the original link or remove it if it’s no longer relevant.
